Yahoo's Marissa Mayer: Live From The Goldman Conference

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is due on stage at the Goldman Sachs technology conference at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco this afternoon, in conversation with Goldman Internet analyst Heath Terry. This is apparently the first time she has spoken at an investment conference since she became Yahoo's CEO.

I'll be blogging the proceedings live; update this page frequently for ongoing updates.

The session is scheduled to start at 12:30 p.m. Pacific time.

12:30 p.m. Jim Coviello, Goldman's chip analyst, is opening up the proceedings; he's introducing Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who will introduce Marissa. He notes that this is Mayer's first investor conference appearance as CEO of Yahoo. Blankfein notes that she met Mayer at some meetings at the White House; now we know they both hang with the Obamas. Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman is here, he notes.

12:33 p.m. Mayer takes the stage with Terry.

Terry asks why she came to Yahoo.

Mayer notes that she worked at Mail, Search, and Maps, among other things at Google. She says Yahoo has a terrific mix of products. Yahoo does many of the same things she did at Google - Mail, Search, Home Page, etc.

On mobile: We have 200 million monthly active users on mobile, spread over 60-75 different applications. She says they are going to focus on a dozen or so applications that people use all the time. She sees lots of new applications, mentioning for instance Groups. The mobile phone is a more ideal place to do group communications, she says.

How do you adjust to the fact that so much data is not available to Yahoo, meaning Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, etc. She says they already have a partnership with Facebook. She notes that they have lots of content from partners.

How does Yahoo rationalize the 60-75 mobile apps? She thinks the right number is more like 12-15. She notes that on the phone many apps are single purpose, which is not the case on the desktop. Each user will have 2-4 of those apps, she says. (Mail, or Sports, or News, or whatever, I presume.)

She says personalization will apply to many situations. She says they can take personal information and provide better, more useful individualized information.

On the Microsoft search relationship: Overall the teams work pretty well together, and they have seen gains in revenue per search The key pieces here are around the alliance itself. They collectively want to grow share, not just trade share from each other. She says there are lots of things they can do to gain search: They are doing well on comprehensiveness and relevance, she says. Latency is also important; searches need to be fast. But the key piece is innovation. The innovation can be on the user interface - inclusion of voice search, searches as you type. She says that is where they need to invest.

On the role of social in search: There is an intersection of content that is most relevant across the Web; but also search from your social graph. Sharing is fundamental. We need sharing built in as a fundamental component.

On the economics of online content: It's an area where Yahoo has been strong for a long time. They will continue to invest in content.

On Yahoo sports: Does that model work in other verticals? Mayer says some of what works there can be copied in other verticals. She mentions how successful they have been in fantasy sports.

On user engagement declining at Yahoo: She sees a lot of opportunity for growth, especially given triple digit growth in some mobile parts of the market. There is 100% correlation between what people do on mobile devices, and what Yahoo offers on the Web. They need to improve the experiences.

On email: Can it still be a business model given the shift to online devices? She says they can still monetize with ads; there is still a business model there, plus it is a large driver of traffic. They might check a sports score or a news story while checking mail. She also says no one thinks email works perfectly; there is room for improvement. She notes that email does not work that well on your phone; she asks the crowd how many people read an email on the phone, then mark it as unread. (Many hands go up.) So there is an opportunity for innovation. She says they are trying to figure out how to make mail work better on phones.

On Yahoo's position in advertising technology market: She says it is an under-appreciated asset. She says they have the best sales force in the industry in selling premium display advertising. They still have room to grow their advertising exchange; she says it works well for advertisers. They need great tools to make programmatic bidding easy.

On the engineering talent at Yahoo: She says one of the pleasant surprises has been that the company has really talented engineers. She says the company has gotten better at operating across the platform; she says in the past some acquisitions were not well integrated into the company.

On the value of the company beyond core operations: Day-to-day, she focuses on core operations. Yahoo Japan and Alibaba have been tremendous investments, she says. Mayer says nice things about the management at both companies.

They are going to audience Q&A. (The room, by the way, is pretty much packed.)

On potentially selling Yahoo Japan: She says it is appreciating, but also strategic for the company. She says Yahoo's business is mostly domestic, and that they need to grow outside the U.S. And Japan needs to be part of that. She also says that a lot of the technologies that Yahoo Japan is built on come from core Yahoo. 7-8 of the top 10 properties in Japan come from core Yahoo.

CFO Ken Goldman says from the floor that the Alibaba investment traditionally has been a more financially oriented transaction; they will continue to look at both of them

On music strategy: She says they have worked with iHeartRadio, and that video is also an important part of the strategy. But she says she is not sure they will pursue music in and of itself.

Mayer says in response to a question that one of the things she did on arriving at Yahoo was increase accountability, with quarterly goals, and quarterly calibration of performance. She also says there has been improved transparency about mistakes or issues.

On where there are tech CEOs she uses as a model: Not really.

She says Yahoo has been able to grow pricing; the hard part is growing usage.